Entrepreneurial skills lend themselves to all kinds of ventures in life, not just to making money.
They certainly lent themselves to Bart Smelley – you may recognize the name: Bart’s son Brad played tight end for the University of Alabama and his other son Chris was a quarterback at the University of South Carolina and played baseball at Alabama – who founded the Tuscaloosa-based Christian ministry organization Filter of Hope that creates household water filters for families living in poverty.
The story:
Before he started Filter of Hope, Smelley was a successful businessman who got involved with a ministry that did a lot of aid work with the people of the Dominican Republic. Commonly voiced among their needs for education and jobs was a desperate need for clean water.
“Bart is kind of a long-time entrepreneur, before he got into ministry. He just kind of got stuck on the clean water thing,” Davis Looney, director of campus partnerships for Filter of Hope, told Yellowhammer News.
Smelley’s clean water efforts originally began with facilitating installation of biosand filters, which simply mimic natural filtration processes, but those filters require significant attention and care.
Looking for something more utilitarian, he began using a method which takes a porous ceramic pot-like container, infuses it with various filtration mechanisms and allows the filtered water to seep through the pores.
“Again, it cleaned water really well, but they were ceramic. You take it up a mountain in the back of a truck with bad roads and the thing is going to be broken by the time you get up there and put it in a house with eight people,” Looney said.
Smelley finally came across the technology of hollow fiber membranes, primarily used for mass scale waste water treatment. Working with engineers, Smelley developed a filter particularly for filtering drinking water and obtained a patent for it.
All of this happened while Smelley was at his previous ministry, and when people began continuously approaching him about buying his filters to use in their ministries around the world, he decided to start his own.
“He saw that the filter itself had potential to do a lot more than what he was doing with it,” Looney said.
And so about four years ago, Smelley started Filter of Hope aiming to sell filters to any and everyone who seeks to do water-related initiatives around the world and to use those revenues to help fund Filter of Hope’s ministry efforts.
Over the years, churches, humanitarian organizations, and disaster relief groups have taken the filters to 56 countries around the world. A couple of hundred were sent to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico within the last year.
As for their own on-the-ground ministry efforts, Filter of Hope works in Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Looney was brought on to establish a college-aged presence in the organization and to facilitate ministry trips. In 2016, 220 college students traveled to three different countries to deliver filters. Last year, Filter of Hope took about 530 students to do the same and this year, it’ll be about 850.
“In this next month, we’ll take students from Oregon State University all the way to South Florida,” Looney said.
“We want them to have an experience that’s beneficial to the people and country where they’re providing people with clean water, they’re sharing their faith, they’re equipping the local church to better serve their areas.”
Follow this link to learn more about Filter of Hope.
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